Look deeply into a funny movie for an important lesson in political philosophy and social ethics:
On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.
Categories
Jorge Luis Borges
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Autobiographical Notes,” The New Yorker (September 11, 1970)
Freedom of speech isn’t a free pass to avoid the consequences of what one says. Or does. Tell that to three members of the Homer, Alaska, city council — Donna Aderhold, David Lewis and Catriona Reynolds — who are the subject of a recall petition.
Well, a superior court judge just did.
Represented by the ACLU, the trio sued to block a recall petition with more than enough voter signatures. Their lawsuit challenged the city attorney’s acceptance of the legal rationale for the recall, claiming the recall attempt punishes the politicians for their speech.
“To conclude that anytime a recall petition is based in part or in whole on what a politician said is protected by the First Amendment,” Superior Court Judge Erin Marston ruled, “would be to eviscerate the recall statute to such an extent that the populace would almost never be able to seek recall of any of their elected officials.”
Now the recall moves forward.
In most of this Land of the Free, citizens lack the ability to recall their elected officials. In places that do have the process, it is rarely used. When it is used, it is often portrayed as voters throwing a temper tantrum.
Or an unfair election do-over.
Or mean-spirited ‘vendetta politics.’
Not so. The petition requirements make recalls very difficult. Recalls don’t happen without some serious problems with the current officeholder(s). And once a recall is triggered, there follows a democratic vote to decide whether citizens want to keep the sitting hireling or find someone new.
Seems pretty reasonable.
When politicians are recalled and removed, they deserve it.*
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The problem seems never to be that good politicians are being recalled, but that too many politicians who should be recalled are not. Back in 2003, the governor of California was recalled. He deserved it. In 2011, a whopping 88 percent of Miami-Dade County voted to recall Mayor Carlos Alvarez. He earned it, too.
Categories
G. K. Chesterton
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)
Categories
Citizenship
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
Last month, two academics wrote a hoax paper. Their preferred journal didn’t accept it, but did suggest an alternative publication. They sent the paper to the recommended outlet, and it was published.
The paper? “The conceptual penis as a social construct.” The Skeptic provided an overview; Professor Gad Saad chortled over its sheer genius. Though a brilliant parody, as a send-up of postmodern academic insanity it fell a tad flat: it was merely published online, and probably not peer-reviewed.
But before you could say “Western civilization is in the toilet and circling the drain,” an equally idiotic paper came to light, published in The Minnesota Review, and apparently offered in earnest by an academic working in “women’s and gender studies.” Entitled “Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities,” the abstract (worth reading in full*) does not mention truth, predictive power, or evidence to advance knowledge of physics. Instead, it pushes the “combining” of “intersectionality and quantum physics” to “provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people,” etcetera. Basically, the problem of physics is not that it is hard, but that it is “oppressive.”
Meanwhile, historian Tom Woods** discovered a University of Hawaii math teacher who admits to not finding math interesting. She blogged her confession about wanting white cis-male mathematicians to quit their jobs “or at least take a demotion” and — if in a “position of power” — resign.
None of this is about the advancement of learning. What we see here is
- a new racism — from non-whites directed against white people — and
- a new sexism — from women and others who are not heterosexual males directed against, you guessed it, heterosexual males
. . . all packaged in cryptic, pretentious, prolix nonsense.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I found it quoted on the Powerline blog: “In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics. Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability.”
** In his daily email for Tuesday this week.
Categories
Jorge Luis Borges
I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Autobiographical Notes,” The New Yorker (September 11, 1970)
Categories
James Huneker
Socialism is but the further screwing up of the State machine to limit the individual.
James Huneker, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1913), p. 364.
Categories
Tennessee and Kentucky
On June 1, 1792, Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the United States. Four years later, Tennessee became the 16th state.